Monday, October 6, 2014

From Ukraine to Syria: UN’s Selective Defense of Human Rights

For
the past several years, the United Nations has served as a platform for
Syria’s enemies to air allegations of human rights abuses and even
attempts to use such allegations to justify military aggression against
Syria itself. Tales of “barrel bombs” being used against civilians, the
bombardment of enemy positions at the cost of civilian lives and the
destruction of vital infrastructure have all been constructs in the
West’s narrative against the Syrian government.

Now that
the US is itself bombing Syria, killing Syrians including innocent men,
women and children, as well as vital infrastructure local populations
depend on for their survival, the UN has grown suddenly quiet. The
Western press too seems to have reverted to its observance of the notion
of “collateral damage.” Suddenly, the very terrorists the Syrian
government has tried to warn the world about for years as it fought them
in its city streets and countrysides, are now bad enough for the end of
defeating them to justify the means of occasionally killing civilians,
so long as they are killed with US rather than Syrian weapons.

The
startling hypocrisy combines with the fact that Syria’s military is
operating within its territory, conducting security operations to secure
its own borders and all territory within it, while the US is operating
thousands of miles from its own shores, in a foreign country, with both a
doubtful pretext and an even more doubtful agenda in mind as it does
so.

Where is the United Nations? The
airstrikes in Syria carried out by the US, Persian Gulf states, and
several European nations are done so without the Syrian government’s
approval, no recognized opposition party has approved of them, and
certainly no UN resolution has provided the West with a mandate to
exercise military force inside of Syria. On this point alone, the UN
should be standing up in vocal protest, leveling sanctions against those
participating in this act of unilateral, illegal military aggression.
Additionally, the UN should be speaking out against the loss of civilian
lives, just as it did during the past several years of chaos in Syria’s
ongoing conflict, as well as preparing monitoring teams and
investigations into the impact of these attacks.

Aside from Syria, there is another
battlefield the UN is suspiciously absent from. Ukraine. In Ukraine,
Kiev has been carrying out increasingly atrocious campaigns of violence
against its own people. As it steadily loses control over territory in
the east of Ukraine, grisly scenes of mass murder, torture, and extrajudicial executions are being uncovered.
Yet there is no protest voiced within the UN, no teams being mobilized
to investigate unearthed crime scenes and no measures taken against the
perpetrators which include ultra-right wing militant groups espousing
modern-day Nazism like the notorious Right Sector.

While
some may claim such accusations are merely “Kremlin propaganda,” it is
the West’s own Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) which provides daily reports from its own monitors on the ground
inside Ukraine, that have mentioned the presence of right-wing
militants, their destruction of Ukraine’s historical heritage, their
attacking and harassing of their political opponents and violence they
are carrying out across the country, from eastern Ukraine to the capital
of Kiev itself.

Recently OSCE reported that
the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which literally flies a flag featuring
Adolf Hitler’s SS Wolfsangel insignia on it, led mobs in the dismantling
of a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Another OSCE report noted that Right Sector was leading mobs in Odessa. An earlier OSCE report from August would
admit another Kiev “volunteer battalion” similar to Azov and Right
Sector, the so-called “Aidar Battalion,” was at the center of several
human rights abuses and in particular, the abduction, torture, and
holding for ransom of eastern Ukrainians.

Clearly there are abuses taking place,
carried out by overtly abhorrent extremist groups espousing ideology
illegal throughout most of Europe, but supported by the European Union,
NATO, and the United States. Why the UN has remained silent on this
while so vocal on other issues raises serious questions about its
objectivity and impartiality.

The UN as a Tool for Special Interests

While
in theory the UN is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of
international law, through clearly biased actions it is revealed to be a
subject to certain special interests, merely using the pretext of human
rights and international law to selectively advance the agenda of
certain member states while ignoring entirely such principles when
convenient.

In Syria, US bombs are now killing
Syrian civilians, destroying infrastructure and all while violating the
sovereignty of the nation of Syria itself. The act of military
aggression the US and its partners are exercising in Syria run contrary
to the UN Charter itself and constitute a grave infraction of
international law. When the UN ponders the steady erosion of its
legitimacy, popularity and effectiveness, it is displays of double
standards like those seen in Syria that are the cause.

Likewise, in Ukraine, where ultra-right
militants espousing Nazism are openly carrying out human rights
violations so often and overtly that even the European-aligned OSCE must
report them all while the UN remains utterly silent and flaccid,
undermines not only the UN itself, but the concept of international law
altogether.

When international law is cited and
enforced selectively by certain member states of the United Nations,
using the UN itself as a platform to legitimize otherwise illegal
actions, the world teeters on the edge of global lawlessness leaving the
remaining members of the UN to ponder alternatives in resolving
injustices perpetuated rather than challenged by the UN and its Charter.

Eastern
Ukrainians, the Syrians and all their respective allies are left with
little other choice than to act unilaterally themselves to defend their
territory and people as well as their interests in the face of rogue
nations that have apparently co-opted and now control much of the UN.

Quotes

"There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach us anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul." Jose Harris

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